Your Unemployed Daughter

People are slowly starting to trickle in for the wedding, and there are now two distinct groups: the groom’s friends, who all went to UVA (a school our groom’s Harvard-educated bride loves to disdain, although secretly I think she may be jealous of the aplomb with which they wear their caps and tackle the rocky terrain) and the bride’s friends, a mixed bag of highly educated, tall-tan-and-terrific semi-employed (in conglomerate) peoples including me, another woman, and her husband.

We all know that Your Unemployed Daughter is sans job, but so is this husband, who was a producer at an ad agency, has been out of work for a year, and has gone back to school to learn HTML and Flash, and “dabble in Java and PHP.” (PHP? Your Unemployed Daughter shows her ignorance with the assumption that that was that drug we learned about in 8th grade, you know, the one that makes you jump out of windows and bend steel pipes with your bare hands? Aka angel dust? Or, is it what tires are made of?)

Drugs or not, going back to school does seem a legitimate, even wise, pursuit in this media moment, and, in fact, the fellow’s wife urged him to do so when he was laid off, as they recount. Might as well take this moment to learn something new, boost your experience, expand your opps in a seemingly opp-less-time. Better to learn something potentially useful than become a master at Guitar Hero, no?

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You know how I only use you for “networking” and to keep in touch with my numerous important friends (386 and counting!) around the world? And for photo storage purposes, and so people can contact me easily about jobs, and as a means of getting out the word on certain important things, like voting for Obama, of course.

Well, now that I’m unemployed, things are a little different. I have come to realize that you offer more. So much more. For instance, if I want to check on that former boss who used to be employed by my former employer and hasn’t defriended me yet to see what she’s up to, I can do that. If I want to feel bad about how little I have in my jobless life, or if I want to feel good about how amazing my life is compared to those poor schmucks still working at TK-named company, you are there for me. If I need to find out who from Jon & Kate + 8 I would be, if I were a member of their family, you will tell me. If I need to take a bogus IQ test to confirm that indeed, there is a reason I am without a job, and that is because I am only passably intelligent, you will provide one for me. If I want to stalk an ex, you give me that freedom.

But I notice these days maybe you aren’t feeling so hot. You seem a little … sluggish. Face it, you’re slow. Are you hungover or something? Do you have swine flu? Cause I expect you to be on top of things. I expect you to at least load. I mean, who else is going to tell me that my former designer is now doing her laundry, or that that reporter slept 10 hours last night, or that that girl I went to high school with and was never really friends with at all but sometimes you need to beef your numbers so shoot me just had her annual OB/GYN exam, whoot! When I’m drinking at a friend’s house and we want to see photos of someone pre plastic surgery, we want to see them NOW!

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Hello, Land of Screened-In Porches

Greetings from Florida! I’ve adjusted to the time difference already!

I’ll stop with the Jon & Kate after this, I swear, but whaddya know, they air that show here, too, and I watched the MOST DRAMATIC rose ceremony EVER (I mean, the FIRST TIME THEY FACE EACH OTHER after Jon’s supposed affair and all that tabloid nonsense) last night, and it was … ho-hum.

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I’m not one of those annoying sky-is-falling people who think that magazines are all going the way of the horse and carriage and that the next few decades will find us hopelessly fat and Wall-E’d, hovered around on little wheelie-buggies reading screens rather than turning pages.

Although as Your Unemployed Daughter I dislike the supply and demand problem created by dying mags, I can’t complain when some of them fold – they seem to be asking for it. But there are others – the Jimi Hendrixes and James Deans of the publishing community – that, if I had my druthers, wouldn’t have choked on their own vomit quite so soon.

A little shout-out to some fallen comrades:

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